The Effectiveness of Abstract Versus Concrete Fear Appeals in Information Security
Authors: Schuetz, Sebastian W.; Benjamin Lowry, Paul; Pienta, Daniel A.; Bennett Thatcher, Jason
Journal: Journal of Management Information Systems (2020)
DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2020.1790187
Information security (ISec) is a pervasive concern of individuals, organizations, and governments. To encourage individuals to engage in and learn about secure behaviors, ISec research has turned to fear appeals, which are short messages that communicate threats and efficacy to elicit protection motivation among recipients. ISec research has reported contradictory findings on what makes fear appeals effective in ISec contexts, and this lack of clarity is problematic, because it may lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, some studies have argued that the mixed findings arise from differences between personal and organizational contexts and that fear appeals do not work well among organizational users. However, this argument has not been empirically tested, and differences in message design provide an equally plausible explanation, which has also not been tested. To reconcile the mixed findings across these studies, we test the effects of context (i.e., personal users vs. organizational users) and degree of message abstractness (i.e., abstract vs. concrete) on fear-appeal outcomes. We draw from construal-level theory to conceptualize the differences between abstract and concret…